


the mind has mountains

by orphan_account



Series: Coming Home [2]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Asexual Romance, M/M, OFC - Freeform, Strex-free AU (for now), Trauma Recovery, Travel, references to past abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-17
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 02:40:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1802332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos and Cecil go to Europe. Well, first, Carlos has a nervous breakdown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the mind has mountains

Night Vale General Hospital specializes in treatment options for most of the injuries and illnesses that affect its customer base, including throat-spider infections, dragon pox, lion pox, and a higher instance of animal maulings than is often encountered outside Night Vale city limits, but it does not have an especially numerous or well-qualified psychiatric faculty. There simply isn’t a demand for one.

Carlos thinks there are probably sound reasons for this. The disposition toward mental illness is usually not a survival trait, and Night Vale is basically all about surviving things. And when mental illness is adaptive, treatment is less likely to be sought. Paranoia, for instance, can really only heighten a person’s chance of making it through an average day in this town. And the ability to dissociate from reality at will from is probably the only thing that makes it possible for certain people to do their jobs, when, for instance, their co-workers die at such a rapid rate that part of the process for new hires is to have them submit a prepared obituary along with their W-9’s. (Carlos catches Cecil looking over Dana’s sometimes, like he’s comforted by the fact that he hasn’t had to read it on-air yet.) 

And then there’s post-traumatic stress.

By all rights, Night Vale General should be the world’s leading research facility for that particular form of mental illness. Nobody in this town survives to adulthood without a few near misses under their belt. Absolutely everyone has _experienced_ trauma. And yet, nobody seems to suffer from it too acutely. At least, not from what Carlos has observed.

And he’s been observing pretty closely lately. Psychiatry is one scientific discipline that’s completely outside his range of specialities, but like any good researcher he’s reviewed the literature, and he collects some local data when he has the chance. For instance, there’s Sheila Langoustini, the night shift manager at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, where Carlos has been eating more and more of his meals lately. She’s a PTA member with two boys in the third and fifth grades (though she’s recently taken them out of Night Vale Elementary, and is sending them Daggers Plunge Charter School now, where the curriculum takes a less squeamish approach to weapons training.) Sheila was one of the glasses-wearing women attacked by the pterodactyls when the portal opened in the elementary school gymnasium not long after Carlos arrived in town. A casual inquiry of Cecil produces the information that Sheila’s never missed a day of work since she was first hired ten years ago. One night, over an open-faced roast beef sandwich plate and slice of invisible pie, Carlos asks her if she’d mind if he asked her some questions about the portal incident—for science, of course. She’s perfectly cheerful about it, and answers every question Carlos can come up with about the dimensions of the portal, and the wingspan and coloring of the pterodactyls, until finally he forces himself to get to the point. 

“Do you still think about it at all? In a, a negative way? Bad dreams, maybe? Or, I don’t know, a tendency to duck when large birds fly overhead?”

“Hmm,” she says, considering. “Not really? Although I guess it was the last kick out the door that made me finally get Lasik surgery for my eyes. I’d been meaning to for years, but my boyfriend thought my glass were cute. Afterwards though, I figured I might as well take the precaution.”

He’s asked other survivors of the random, regular disasters that occur in Night Vale similarly casual-but-pointed questions, and he always gets the same kind of response. Yes, they think about it sometimes, but not that often; they’re almost always happy to talk about it without any squeamishness (“Like Cecil says, anything for science, right?”); and the only real changes to their lives and behavior patterns that resulted were in the form of slight, pragmatic alterations to their routines that might reduce similar risks in the future, but aren’t a subject of any special emotional sensitivity for them. 

Eventually Carlos forms a hypothesis: events resulting in catastrophic damage, death, and injury are not perceived as traumas by those they affect unless such events are exceptional. In a place like Night Vale, where daily risk of death is just a part of life, the “post” part of post-traumatic stress never comes around. People survive, or they don’t. They adjust, and move on. It’s remarkable, and enviable, and probably not at all healthy, any more than a lack of pain receptors is healthy, but it makes it possible for people to function, and that seems to be the important thing.

Carlos envies them.

It’s been six months since his former research partner and stalkery not-quite-an-ex came to Night Vale on purpose to kidnap Carlos (and his foster daughter, though truthfully it would be a stretch to call that kidnapping, since Nijeia had sneaked into the car with him and Robert of her own free will.) Six months had passed since the various terrifying keepers of law and order in Night Vale—secret police, Orphanarians, and whatever dim, restless consciousness that the city as a body manifests to draw in the people it wants to keep, and expel the people it doesn’t approve of—had apprehended Robert, imprisoned him, lost him again, and driven him into the Whispering Forest, where he, or at least some fragments of his consciousness, still remain. Carlos had never visited the Forest without good reason, and now he never goes there at all. His former lab assistant, Perry, who has recently finished his degree at Night Vale Community College, is now employed by the municipal parks and recreation department, thanks in part to Carlos’s glowing recommendation. Since Perry is one of the only people who can pass in and out of the Forest in perfect safety, he is now also Night Vale’s sole de facto forest ranger, and anything Carlos wants to know about the Forest, or anything he discovers about it through his other research, he passes on to Perry. 

It’s also been just a little over six months since he started dating Cecil Palmer. 

To say that this is the longest relationship Carlos has ever been in is to stretch a point. His only other relationship was in high school, and it had ended pretty traumatically when his boyfriend had started pressing him for sex. Teenage Carlos had been a short, chubby nerd, with a terrible haircut and sporadically blossoming patches of acne and too-dark facial hair. For most of high school, he didn’t have any friends at all, until he worked up the nerve to start going to his school’s newly-formed Pride Club. There, at least, feeling like an outsider was something that everyone had in common. He wasn’t the only Latino kid at his school—he’d grown up in Texas, after all—but he had sort of naturally gravitated to hanging around Antonio, who in addition to being the only other person of color in the club, was tall, lanky, cheerful, and while not exactly handsome, had a kind of perpetual excited energy about him that made his dark eyes sparkle and his long thin hands gesture and flutter excitedly when he spoke. 

The fact that Antonio was nice to everyone didn’t stop Carlos from falling in love the moment Antonio started being nice to _him_. He was too unused to such consideration to have any defenses against it. 

Despite the social disadvantages that had crossed Antonio’s path with Carlos’s in the first place, he was fairly popular, active in the drama department, a natural leader at Pride meetings. He had a knack for getting around the right side of teachers when he wanted to, and his steady campaigning was the biggest reason why, after two years of stalling and excuses on the part of the administration, they’d finally been given permission to make the club official and hold their meetings on school grounds. 

Looking back, Carlos still doesn’t know why such an obviously gifted kid was ever interested in _him_ in the first place, but maybe he’d just been the sort to develop a soft spot for hopeless cases. In any event, they’d only been together for a few weeks when Antonio started dropping heavy hints that he’d wanted to do more than just kiss. Carlos had put him off with excuses for as long as possible, but eventually he’d panicked. At that age, he had a naive conviction (that he’d never, really, completely outgrown) that honesty was always the best policy. Not just honesty, in fact, but a degree of frankness and over-sharing of his every half-developed thought on a subject, that presented no definite conclusions, but rather invited the listener to examine the raw data of his feelings and help him make sense of them in an objective and unprejudiced way. He’d always been a scientist at heart, and deep down he must have believed that everyone else was too, preferring, like he did, to struggle for the deeper truth of things, rather than hear simple, reassuring half-truths.

But Antonio was less kind, or maybe just less secure in this particular area of his life, than Carlos had taken him for. He’d been furious. Not, to give him credit, because Carlos didn’t want to have sex. If he’d only been scared, or just not ready, Antonio would probably have been patient and understanding. But even though he’d never yet heard the word “asexual” outside the context of cellular mitosis, Carlos had been crystal clear in his own mind that the idea of sex was frightening, baffling, invasive, and not a little gross. He’d been hoping that Antonio could help him understand what was wrong with him, being two years older and light-years more experienced. Instead, Antonio had walked away and never spoken to him again. By the time the bell rang at the end of school the next day, every single one of his friends from Pride had heard that Carlos was “faking gay”—and after that, none of them spoke to him again either. He showed up to the next club meeting to find that they’d switched locations without telling him. He’d never tried to go back again.

He’d resigned himself to being lonely after that. It wasn’t that he didn’t meet people he liked, people he could easily have developed feelings for, if he’d let himself. And after he went through his last growth spurt, and nature started revealing that she’d had kinder intentions for his physical appearance than it had seemed when he was younger, he had no shortage of interested offers. But it wouldn’t have been logical to begin something he knew he could never finish. Any relationship he got into was bound to come to a crashing halt the moment the preliminaries were over and the inevitable expectation of sex was broached. In grad school, he’d finally learned that there were other people like him, which helped him feel much more at peace with himself. But he’d never tried to find another asexual person to date. Maybe the memories of that first, stunning rejection were enough to put anyone off emotional intimacy for life; maybe he really was just too busy to bother with relationships, like he told everyone. In any case, it got easier and easier as time went by to build a life that naturally excluded closeness with other human beings. He never did pick up the knack of making a lot of friends. He was never sure where the boundary lines were between friendship and more dangerous feelings, for people like him.

Robert had changed that, at first. Boisterous, friendly, boundary-crashing Robert, who was better-looking than Carlos, safely straight, and so genuinely enthusiastic about their shared research that Carlos couldn’t help being charmed, couldn’t help letting his walls down, not when they spent so much time alone together working in the lab, eating takeout, watching internet videos while they waited for data to collate. Robert had persuaded him that it was past time he had a real friend, and Carlos had come to agree. He was older now, less than a year away from getting his Ph.D., and it was natural that he should be more confident, less damaged, better able to relate to other human beings than he had been when he was a painfully shy undergrad. Truthfully, he thought he’d needed someone like Robert, someone who didn’t take “no” for an answer when he insisted that he didn’t like drinking that much, hated bars, hated the crowds and noise and confusion of trying to socialize in them. Robert had dragged him out of his own head. Carlos had been grateful for that, terribly grateful. And it had been so many years since anyone had touched him except on accident, he didn’t think anything of the fact that Robert got handsy and clingy when he was drunk. Robert was straight, after all. Carlos had listened to enough stories about failed relationships and “crazy bitch” ex-girlfriends to have any doubt of that.

It had been both an utter shock and a complete lack of surprise when Robert finally broached the idea that they should be together, both as lovers and as lab partners. This time, Carlos had a much less vague and confused set of data to present in counterpoint. He’d told Robert about Antonio. He’d told him about his research into asexuality as an orientation. Robert, after all, was a real scientist, like him; Robert could be trusted to evaluate the information and come up with an honest and unbiased conclusion.

“Look,” Robert said, when Carlos had finished. “I’ve never been with a man before. I mean, you’re objectively hot, anyone with eyes can see that, but am I really attracted to you, or am I just having a Pavlovian horniness reaction to your hair? And you, I mean—I’m not saying what you felt in high school isn’t valid, but it was sixteen years ago. How do you know you haven’t changed, or that maybe you just weren’t into that guy? All I’m saying is that experiments are called for. Maybe with anesthetics, so the results don’t get skewed by my conditioned aversion to gay sex, or your conditioned aversion to sex in general.”

His logic had been irresistible. Carlos has always been weak for logic. And some desperate, starved part of him wanted so badly for Robert’s optimism to be justified that he ignored the rigorously factual part of his brain that pointed out that his aversion to sex was not conditioned, but had been part of him for as long as he could remember. When they’d gone to the bar together, Carlos’s entire body was so taut and thrumming with nerves that he’d naturally wondered if he wasn’t finally feeling the beginnings of a genuine sexual arousal response. He doesn’t know which one of them was more drunk when they left the bar a couple of hours later, just that they’d both been unfit to drive. They’d stumbled back to Robert’s apartment together, leaning heavily on each other for support, Carlos so numb with ethanol that he felt less apprehension than simple curiosity about what might happen once they were inside. They had established the parameters of their experiment ahead of time: a mutual exchange of oral sex, with Robert being the first recipient (the order having been determined by a coin toss.) They had reviewed the literature—which is to say, watched gay porn, for instruction in technique—an experience Carlos hadn’t found in the least arousing, but who could be aroused by anything so blatantly artificial and silly? He’d even practiced a little, with bananas, just to be sure he wouldn’t make any painful blunders involving teeth, which would certainly prejudice the results of the experiment.

It was all very simple and neat and orderly in his head. And he bitterly resented how short a time it took before it became painfully obvious to him that the experiment was going to be a complete failure.

He thinks about that night as little as possible nowadays, although he acquired sense memories of smell and taste from the experience that he’s never going to be rid of, memories that make his gorge rise any time they’re brought to mind. But for a long while immediately afterwards it was impossible to get any distance from it, because Robert wouldn’t allow it. Carlos’s fantastically awkward attempt at giving him a blow job had apparently changed his life. Over the next several months, Carlos slowly began to read between the lines of all the stories Robert had told him about his failed relationships—his jealousy, his bitter resentment, his complaints of being neglected—Robert _consumed_ people, once he’d decided they could give him something that he needed. No amount of attention, or sympathy, or delicate let-downs were enough for him. At first he seemed to accept that the experiment had only served to confirm Carlos’s asexuality, even as it had confirmed Robert’s same-sex attraction. But any true acceptance was short lived, or a complete pretense from the beginning. He had developed feelings, and he couldn’t conceive of having such an intense emotional bond without giving them some form of sexual expression. 

The intensity of their former friendship began to give way to an unbalanced but inescapable co-dependency in which Robert grew more and more unstable and Carlos worked harder and harder to both keep him at a distance and keep him from coming apart altogether. Robert did a very good job of making sure that Carlos never felt less than completely responsible for his current crisis. It was like Robert felt himself to be stranded and thirsting to death in a desert, and Carlos was standing there with a canteen of water which he simply refused to share out of some kind of spite or deformity of character. Carlos was miserable and guilty and disgusted and absolutely trapped. 

Then things seemed to get better. They hit a research breakthrough; they were both within a couple of months of their defense, and they were both getting job offers. Not an overwhelming abundance of them, but enough to make them both feel that the next step in their careers was assured. Robert started joking about them taking jobs at the same university, but Carlos knew for certain Robert hadn’t received offers for any of the same places as him. It seemed inevitable that their paths would veer away from each other, just as naturally as they’d crossed in the first place. Carlos regarded the prospect with intense relief.

But then Robert had come to his apartment with a gun—another shock that had somehow failed to surprise—and Carlos had fled to Night Vale, where he’d run almost immediately into a man who called him “perfect” on the radio and fell in love with him instantly. It had taken a year before Carlos could bring himself to give Cecil a chance, and then Robert had reappeared, as if he’d sensed Carlos reaching for happiness with someone else. And although there had been no time, no room to feel anger at first, Carlos looks back on this now with something almost akin to rage. It was one thing to dominate all of Carlos’s energy and attention when Carlos had been tacitly consenting to the manipulation, but to chase him down in his new life as if he was missing property that needed to be reclaimed? There are days when Carlos has to sit on his twitching fingers to keep himself from acting out his fantasies about taking a trip out to the Whispering Forest with a chainsaw and a wheelbarrow for hauling firewood. 

But he can’t completely wish Robert out his history, because in fleeing Robert he had found Cecil, who is everything that is good, real, and safe in the world. With Cecil, there is compromise, but never sacrifice; need, without greediness; he is loved, but not devoured. Cecil loves Carlos for all the individual, imperfect facets that make up his being. Robert was a parasite; Cecil is a whole and complete person, giving of himself generously, from abundance. And Carlos…he feels, sometimes, that he might be slightly less whole. But he’s working on it. With Cecil, there is all the time and patience in the world to give himself the attention he needs. Cecil wants to share his life, but he doesn’t expect to _be_ his life.

The last six months have been the happiest Carlos can remember since he was a very small boy. He relishes the simple routines of the small domestic circle they’ve formed with Nijeia, who’s seventeen and a half now and studying to take the SATs, while rolling her eyes at the various college brochures Carlos pointedly leaves lying on her bed. His research in Night Vale continues to be fascinating and rewarding beyond the wildest dreams of scientists anywhere in the world. Cecil works long, irregular hours, but so does Carlos, and while negotiating the overlapping free times in their schedules is sometimes a logistical challenge, they make it work, because they want it to work. Every night, Carlos rediscovers the magic of letting himself be touched without fear. It’s a good life. He’s happy.

But he’s increasingly aware that his happiness is being interrupted. There are moments—sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometime entire days—when he feels almost like there’s some kind of force from outside himself that is acting on his brain to disrupt the signal that his safe, secure, happy situation should be transmitting to his emotions. He isn’t losing time, exactly, but sometimes when he’s alone in the lab, or watching a movie at home, he blinks and realizes that he’s spent God knows how long thinking repetitive, looping thoughts, either about chopping down trees in the Whispering Forest, or about inventing time travel and sneaking up on Robert in their old lab and clobbering him over the head—or sometimes replaying events, like the moment he walked into Nijeia’s room and saw Robert sitting at the desk. He analyzes all the things could have gone (differently) wrong, if Cecil hadn’t been home, if Nijeia hadn’t been home, if Robert had decided to simply cut his losses and shoot everyone…

Carlos invents a sensory mechanism that reads fluctuations in the environment, including weather patterns, temperature, the pulse and respiratory rates of any nearby people, thermal readings to register the presence all nearby life forms, seismic activity—every possible indication of oncoming disaster that is measurable to science. He calls it a danger meter, with Nijeia’s approval. He keeps it on him at all times. For awhile, it helps to calm the irrational and vexing sensations of _something bad is going to happen_ and _only you can prevent it,_ that overwhelm him at unexpected moments. But it’s only a palliative; the device makes him aware of problems, but doesn’t tell him how to fix them.

Every time he sees Cecil after a separation of more than a few hours, the first question out of Cecil’s mouth is some version of, “how are you?” And he knows that with Cecil the question is more than routine. But Carlos’s reply is always some variation on “good” or “fine”, followed by a smile, or a kiss on the cheek. At no point is Carlos conscious of lying. Of course he’s fine; he has a wonderful life. Maybe his brain isn’t being being perfectly well behaved, maybe he experiences instances of anxiety or dissociation or vengeful fantasies against botanical life, but all of that is peripheral. The fundamentals of his life are stable. He has absolutely nothing to complain about.

It isn’t until the day Carlos gets lost driving in downtown Night Vale that he realizes that something might, in fact, be genuinely wrong despite all of this. And realizes, rather more embarrassingly, that Cecil has not been in the least fooled by all of his “goods” and “fines” and smiles.

*

It’s mid-January, and the temperature is in the lower fifties. Carlos is heading home by way of a stop at the Ralph’s. He’s still wearing his lab coat, because the only other warm jacket he owns is still in storage—he’s never really seen a good reason to unpack it since he finished his master’s degree and returned to the southwest. Also, he has a bad habit of just forgetting to take his lab coats off, even when it’s hot. This is probably why so many people smile or wave or just do double-takes when he’s out and about in Night Vale. Everybody around here listens to Cecil’s show. 

Most of the time Carlos doesn’t mind being recognized. It can make things simpler when he needs to conduct interviews, or just poke around. And the strangers who strike up conversations with him are by and large very nice people. He’s gotten used to strangers asking after Cecil as though they’re old acquaintances. And while Robert’s arrest and escape had been reported on the radio, Cecil hadn’t mentioned his connection to Carlos, so no one puts him on the spot by asking him how he’s doing in that pointed way that people do when they’re too well-mannered to bring up a painful incident directly, but not quite well-mannered enough to steer clear of the subject altogether. 

Carlos has had a long and frustrating day at work already. He hasn’t yet gotten around to hiring replacements for Perry and Nijeia, or even to advertising for the positions, and his research is progressing frustratingly slowly without extra sets of hands and eyes to mind the machines and record readings. From time to time Nijeia will come in and help out for an afternoon, but now that Carlos is her foster father and she doesn’t have to kill time to avoid going back to the Orphanarium, he usually insists that she stay home and study. He plans to go back into the lab early tomorrow morning but for now he’s really looking forward to being home at last, and eating the vegetable stir fry with rice that Cecil plans to make for dinner that evening.

He’s in the produce section, choosing vegetables for his basket, when something strange happens. Not strange in the Night Vale sense of the word—no portals open up next to the fruit kiosk, the shoppers don’t open their mouths to reveal long, writhing black tongues. It’s just a man, completely normal-seeming in every way, who looks at Carlos while Carlos is deciding how many peppers to buy, and whether he prefers red or yellow, or if he should get both. Carlos is more sensitive to the tingling sensation of eyes on his back than he used to be, so he looks around as soon as he’s aware of it, and ends up locking eyes with the man. He doesn’t recognize him. But instead of averting his gaze, the man only intensifies his scrutiny when he sees Carlos looking back. His eyes travel from Carlos’s hair, down the length of his body, to his battered Converse sneakers. Then he meets Carlos’s eyes again, and winks once, deliberately. 

Carlos blushes, hot and bright and humiliated. He grabs a sleeve of multicolored peppers and throws it in the basket, then walks away as quickly as he can without it looking weird. His heart is beating too fast; his breathing is abnormally quick. And he is overpoweringly, bafflingly _angry_.

 _Who does that?_ he fumed to himself, as he fumbled with the packages in his basket, trying to scan them at the self-checkout lane. _What kind of person thinks they have the right to just stare at someone else, like they’re meat, like they’ve got any right to…he must know who I am, so he knows I’m with Cecil, how could he think I’d want another man to…but he didn’t care, he just did what he wanted, he didn’t care how it would make me feel…it was rude, and invasive, and I feel like I need a shower. I wish I’d thrown the peppers at him. Or a tomato, they were right there. I would have had to pay for it, but it would be worth it…_

Carlos bags his purchases up with clumsy, shaking hands, and stalks out of the store without bothering to take his receipt. Once he’s safely in the car with the doors locked, he can’t do anything but sit there for a minute. There’s a kind of hazy film over his thoughts. Parts of his brain are humming along at top speed with no input from him at all, but conscious thought is beyond his capabilities. He finds himself wishing the man had made some kind of move on him, threatened him directly, so that Carlos would have been justified in screaming at him to go away, right where everyone could hear…see how he liked being embarrassed, humiliated, stared at…

 _But he wasn’t threatening you indirectly, either,_ points out a cool, logical voice in his head, as he pulls out of the parking lot and merges into traffic. Oxford Street isn’t too crowded at this time of day; Carlos had worked late, and rush hour traffic is mostly over. _He wasn’t threatening at all. He was just flirting. It’s not that unusual, even if you think his taste is weird. Why does it bother you so much?_

Dissatisfied with himself, and the messy, disordered logic of his thinking, Carlos drives without really paying attention to anything except the distance between himself and the car in front of him, sinking into the almost trancelike state that driving a familiar route allows for. He ends up missing his turn and not noticing until he’s half a mile further down Oxford Street than he needs to be. He swears under his breath when he finally does notice and makes an illegal U-turn at the next light. But then he misses his turn _again_.

The third time down the street, Carlos pays more attention. But he keeps driving, and driving, and the minutes stretch on, and he can’t remember how long it normally takes him to get from the store to home. Ten minutes? Surely he’s been driving for longer than that. But his phone doesn’t keep the right time, of course, because Night Vale, and the clock on his car’s dash just blinks _13:00_ no matter how many times he tries to set it. Maybe there’s invisible construction on Oxford Street today, and drivers are being directed into temporal loops while the crews are out repairing potholes? He checks the radio in the hopes of a traffic update (Cecil should be home by now, but for all he knows he’s in a completely different time zone from the radio station). Instead of his boyfriend’s voice, however, all he hears is broadcast of a series of noises that might be trapdoors opening and people falling through them. Carlos sighs, and when he looks around him, he realizes he has no idea where he is anymore. Everything around him _looks_ like Night Vale, which is to say that it looks like essentially every small town in the midwest, with buildings and shrubbery and cars and sidewalks. None of it is familiar though.

There’s no reason to panic. He can’t be too lost. There simply isn’t enough of Night Vale to get lost in, and he can’t have gone outside city limits because he’s not on Route 800. But he has been driving for much longer than planned, and it has been a very long day, and his skin is still crawling from that encounter at the Ralph’s, and he wants to be _home_. 

He pulls into the parking lot of an office building and stops the car, taking out his phone. Cecil answers on the first ring.

“I’m lost,” Carlos announces, without preamble. “Did I miss a traffic update earlier? Is Oxford Street longer than normal today?”

“No,” says Cecil slowly. “There weren’t any special traffic bulletins today. What part of Oxford Street are you on?”

“Uh.” Carlos looks around. “I’m not sure, I had to turn around a few times. The north end, I think. There’s a Staples on the left side of the road.”

Cecil is quiet for a moment. “To the best of my knowledge, the Staples is on Somerset. Maybe you took a wrong turn?”

“I haven’t turned, period, except for U-turns! I’m somewhere I’ve never been before and I got there by driving in a straight line!”

“Okay,” says Cecil, his voice soothing, like he thinks Carlos is upset. Which is irritating, right at that moment, because Carlos is _not_ upset, he’s lost, and he’s tired, and it’s totally different. “Maybe something happened after I left work. But, if you’re across from the Staples, try taking the next left, and then turning right at the stoplight.”

Which is exactly what Carlos would do, _if he was on Somerset Drive_ , which he just said was impossible. Clearly he’s not going to set any help from Cecil. “Fine, I’ll try that,” he says, attempting not to sound as though he is gritting his teeth. “I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

“I’ll start chanting to the rice cooker,” says Cecil. “See you soon.”

Carlos hangs up and drives back to the road. When he reaches the intersection after the Staples, he looks at the street signs. The one for his road clearly reads “Somerset Drive.” He stares at it for a long time, and doesn’t move until the car behind him begins to honk.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s home. He climbs the steps to the front door, hands full of grocery bags. Before he can start fumbling for his keys, the door opens, and Cecil is standing there, wearing the same smile he always wears when Carlos comes home after a long day: the one that says, _It’s been hours since I saw you! I’m so happy you’re here!_

But no, on second thought, it isn’t exactly the same smile. Cecil is happy, but he’s also a little worried. Carlos can tell by the way he immediately reaches to take some of the groceries from him, then places a hand on his back to guide him inside.

“I called into the station after I talked to you,” he says, as he starts setting the dinner ingredients out on the counter. The little rice cooker is steaming away contentedly on the island in the middle of the kitchen. “There weren’t any new traffic bulletins about Oxford Street. Were you okay, finding your way back? I mean, you’re here now obviously…”

Carlos feels strangely numb, with maybe a little tingling in his face and in the tips of his fingers. “You were right. I was on Somerset. Not sure how I got there, but. Yeah.”

“Oh.” Cecil’s tone is carefully neutral. No doubt he’s remembering how insistent and borderline angry Carlos had been on the phone when he’d suggested that maybe Carlos had taken a wrong turn. Now he’s being cautious about what he says next. Caution, coming from Cecil, stings worse than a rebuke. Cecil is usually the embodiment of open-heartedness in everything he says and feels around Carlos.

“I’m sorry I got snappy on the phone.” Carlos picks up a jar of tomato sauce and stares at it, trying to remember if he was supposed to put it away or leave it out for cooking. “I, uh. I had a long day. I’m not really feeling like myself right now.”

“Who do you feel like instead?” Cecil blinks.

“I—no, Cecil, I don’t mean literally.” 

“Oh. What did you mean?”

“I’m just a little out of it.” Carlos transfers the jar from hand to hand. The shape seems unfamiliar, alien to his senses. “My research is stalling for lack of warm bodies, and at the Ralph’s there was—um, there was a lot of people. The, uh, crowd got to me.” He’s not telling Cecil that he nearly had a meltdown because someone tried to flirt with him. Either Cecil wouldn’t see what the big deal was, or his over-protective streak would get the better of him and he’d do something drastic, like call in a favor from the secret police and have the man identified and driven out of town into the sand wastes. 

“I didn’t want to say anything,” Cecil begins, slowly, making a show of arranging the vegetables on the cutting board, “but you have seemed kind of distracted lately. Not that I’m complaining! You’ve been wonderfully attentive to me, as always. But sometimes…”

He trails off, not looking at Carlos. The jar of tomato sauce suddenly seems much heavier than it did a few seconds ago. “Sometimes?”

“It’s like you go away. Up here.” Cecil taps the side of his head. “But of course, as a scientist, you are always thinking, and probably I wouldn’t have a hope of understanding the complexity of the scientific mysteries you contemplate. I just…hope it’s nothing more troubling than that.”

Carlos opens his mouth. Nothing comes out. He looks down at his feet.

Then a slim, dark hand comes to rest atop his. Carlos looks up, and Cecil, standing before him, smiles gently. He takes the jar of tomato sauce out of his hand and puts it on the counter, then takes both of Carlos’s hands in his and squeezes them.

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Cecil tells him. “Just remember that when you do want to talk, I want to listen.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Carlos blurts. He can feel his ears turning red, but he forces himself to press on. “You’re right, I am distracted. Not—not all the time, it comes and goes, but pretty often, lately. But I don’t know how to talk about it. It isn’t a…a thing, so much as a lack of something. I, uh…” He chews on his lower lip, shaking his head. “Sorry. I don’t have a lot of practice with this.”

“Are you okay?” says Cecil. “Let’s start with that. A nice, simple yes or no question.”

Carlos lifts his eyes to meet Cecil. They are warm, and dark, the usual violet shade having deepened to something closer to indigo. They radiate tenderness and concern.

“I don’t know,” Carlos manages, finally. “I think…most of the time, I am. Mostly, I’m fine. But sometimes…”

“What about right now?”

It is a good question. Simple, direct, and incredibly difficult to answer. Cecil is a very skilled interviewer. “No,” Carlos says, and the simple effort of that one word takes all the energy of running a marathon. “Not really.”

Cecil’s reaction is instant. He lets go of Carlos’s hands, but only so he can wrap long, skinny arms around his waist. He pulls Carlos close and holds him tight with all the incongruous strength of those arms, and Carlos, after a moment of stiffness, melts into the embrace.

“Thank you for telling me,” Cecil murmurs into his ear. “In light of this conversation, I think we should table the stir-fry until tomorrow night. Right now I would much rather be holding you than cooking. Shall we order Chinese and adjourn to the sofa?”

Carlos smiles into Cecil’s shoulder. It seems almost childish that something as simple as the promise of an evening of cuddling could fix anything—but then, it had only taken a strange man _looking_ at him to complete overturn his equilibrium, so evidence would suggest that he is probably a little unbalanced. Which is not something than will be fixed in an evening, even by the best of cuddling sessions. But he’ll take a temporary relief where he can get it.

“It sounds great,” he assures Cecil. “You call. I’ll get Netflix started.”

Cecil leans back and beams at him. And Carlos discovers that he’s already feeling better—enough that when he smiles back at Cecil, it’s hardly forced at all.

*

They have a relaxed and pleasant evening of takeout and television, and Carlos doesn’t have any trouble falling asleep that night. But when he wakes up, reeling from a nightmare (the quiet kind, luckily, no screaming or flailing that will disturb Cecil) he doesn’t get back to sleep immediately. And that’s when the anxiety comes rushing back in to fill up the blank spaces that sleep had created in his head. He lies in bed for ten minutes, then slips out from beneath the covers as quietly as possible. Cecil is a light sleeper—more so now than before the whole Robert thing, like part of him is always on guard—but Carlos manages to steal from the room without waking him.

He visits the bathroom, then goes to sit in the living room without turning on any of the lights. His laptop is sitting on the coffee table, and he opens it, so the glow of the screen acts as a kind of nightlight. He pulls the chili pepper afghan off the back of the couch and onto his bare shoulders.

Ever since he started dating Cecil, Carlos has become aware of the existence of a unique emotional phenomenon that he’s mentally dubbed “asexual loneliness break-up panic”. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Carlos had been lonely almost his whole life before he met Cecil—more so after his _abuela_ died, but even before that, he’d been aware that loneliness was probably what lay in his future. And the thing is—that was fine, more or less. He’d never known anything else, so he didn’t have anything better to compare his isolated existence to. But then Cecil had fallen in love with him, and Carlos, assuming it could never work, had held out against his own feelings for as long as possible. Then he’d caved in the end, and he’d told Cecil everything, and Cecil had accepted it—accepted _Carlos_ exactly the way he was, without asking or demanding or even hinting that he might not be satisfied without more than Carlos was able to give. And for the first time in his life Carlos had trusted another human being enough to risk genuine intimacy. It had been a terrifying undertaking in a lot of ways, but Cecil has never given Carlos a single reason to regret it. And the rewards have been beyond anything Carlos had ever dared to hope for. Now that he isn’t lonely, now that he lives daily in the knowledge that Cecil loves him, and knows him, and will be there when Carlos needs him, he looks back on his old life and is amazed that he’d ever managed to get by without that simple security.

There are also moments, though—not frequent, perhaps, but more frequent than he’s comfortable with—when his mind wanders down the treacherous path of “what if.” What if Cecil is taken from him, in one of the myriad ways that Night Vale snatches people away from their loved ones on a daily basis? Or what if something far more mundane happens—what if Cecil gets tired of his loud chewing, or his terrible habit of forgetting to call when he’s pre-occupied at the lab? What if he starts to regret shackling himself to a serious relationship that denies him sexual intimacy? What if their relationship simply ends one day, in any of the simple, boring, happiness-destroying ways that relationships end everywhere, every day?

What will Carlos do then?

It wouldn’t be nearly as simple as just going back to the way things were before, when he was mostly content to be alone. From now on, he’ll always know what he’s missing. He can’t imagine his life without Cecil, but even if, one day, after a long period of recovery, he _could_ imagine the possibility of moving on and building a relationship with someone else…who else would accept him the way Cecil does? Who else could possibly want a damaged, nervous, insecure science nerd who can’t even give them sex? The answer, it seems plain to Carlos, is no one. That is, maybe somewhere out in the world there might be someone, but the odds that Carlos would ever even meet them are staggeringly low. 

He doesn’t even know why he lets himself get carried away by this train of thought. The very last thing Cecil wants to do is break up with him, Carlos is certain of that. But…things change. The future is terrifyingly devoid of predictable outcomes. Their lives, though not chaotic in themselves, are buffeted by chaos. Anything could happen; lots of anythings already had happened. Carlos cannot be emotionally prepared for multiple mutually exclusive possibilities all at the same time. He has no control over what his life, or Cecil’s, or Nijeia’s will be in the next year, or even that next day, and that knowledge is almost too much to bear at times.

Though why his brain seems to think that he needs to thrash over the problem at 3:00 in the morning just because he had the misfortune to be awakened by a nightmare, Carlos doesn’t know. It’s not like he’s going to solve existential uncertainty as a base state of human existence just by making himself sleep deprived. 

But then, it’s also not like there’s any rational reason to be overpowered by fear and rage just because a man had looked at him in the grocery store. And losing track of his surroundings so completely that he got lost on a routine drive home from the grocery store is also not any great indicator of mental stability. The fact of the matter is that his brain is presently disposed to latch onto anything unpleasant and disagreeable, and make it seem a hundred times more urgent than it actually is—so urgent that a solution must be found instantly, or the world (metaphorically speaking, for once) will end.

Content with this explanation, if not content with himself, Carlos stands, stretches and heads back to the bedroom. He pauses in the hallway and looks at the next door down—the door to Nijeia’s room. The first time Carlos had ever entered that room, he’d found Robert inside it. And even though Robert had only been there for a few minutes, and Nijeia has had it marked unmistakably as her own territory for the last six months, Carlos never stays in there for very long if he can possibly help it. He wishes they had somewhere else for Nijeia to sleep. Maybe it was time for them to start looking for a bigger place.

 _Or maybe,_ a quiet voice at the back of his brain adds, _you should think about getting out of Night Vale for awhile._

Carlos dismisses the intrusive thought instantly. A change of scenery might do him good—he’s considered it before. But the only place he wants to be right now is with Cecil. And he can’t see Cecil ever leaving Night Vale, even briefly.

He turns away from the hall and follows the sounds of Cecil’s light, sonorous snores back to their bed. Sleep does not come quickly, but for the first time in awhile he isn’t awake to see the dawn.


End file.
